Some of Nothing: Disastrous Obama Presidency Predicted on Chris Matthews' Show

Disastrous Obama Presidency Predicted on Chris Matthews' Show
Monday, December 1, 2008

Via Crooks and Liars, the Chris Matthews cadre of cretins predicts that President Obama's political problems are going to come from the "angry" left, such as "working people":

MATTHEWS: If we try to put up the trade walls, are we going to have a fight on labor issues like this card check thing, about being able to organize individual decision making rather than a big voting election kind of thing. Those kind of issues can really, as you say, could divide the Democrats, right?
CONNOLLY: Absolutely but here's the key to this: Rahm Emanuel, Chief of Staff. What did he do when he was in the House Democratic Caucus? He often was the person who had to break it to the liberals in that caucuses that things were not going to go their way.

MATTHEWS: Who's going to break it to the blogosphere? They don't like anything that looks like a give to the right. Where are they doing to be on this thing? Are they going to give him a break if he doesn't go hard left and doesn't do what they want?

WHITAKER: I think that Obama has to worry as much about the far left as he does about the far right. But look, you know I think that it could be a plus for him in some ways because I think they are going to give him what you might call a “Sista Soulja moment” when he can stand up to them.

MATTHEWS: Right.

WHITAKER: And talking to some veterans in those early Clinton wars who think that particularly this issue of the card check push by the labor unions to change the rules on organizing could be a moment for him either by delaying that, standing up to the unions, of positioning himself more in the middle and making it harder for the far right to position him the way they tried to during the campaign.

MATTHEWS: You see that, David?

IGNATIUS: This is where the economic crisis, you know, ends up being crucial because people are angry. The country's furious and a lot of these really divisive issues I think will come from the left, not from the right and they'll come from unions, from working people who are enraged at bailouts for big banks and wealthy executives and the pressure on Obama to check some what he'd like to do on the economy I think is going to be very strong from angry people.

MATTHEWS: And you say the left is going to fight anything that looks too conciliatory?

IGNATIUS: You can, it's been obvious now for the past few weeks that the anger in the country is working its way through Congress and it's, the bailouts might make sense in a macro-economic sense but they're increasingly tough politics.

Let's pause for a moment to think about the last eight years and what exactly has made the left so darned angry. Could it be a disastrous, unnecessary war (the one that Obama seemed pretty angry about at the time)? Could it be the recurring transference of public goods to private hands? Could it be the willful ignorance and manipulation of climate science (or science of any kind)? Could it be government secrecy, illegal wiretapping, blatant disregard for the Geneva Conventions? Could it be a skyrocketing debt, persistent deregulation of business leading to a $700 billion economic crisis, or a constant inability to appreciate risks and take responsibility for actions? Could it be the breaching of the levies that "nobody could have predicted" or the uninhabitable FEMA trailers or the eating of cake while entire cities drowned? Could it be the decision to disregard the "historical document" titled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US"? Could it be the outing of a CIA agent working to secure America from weapons of mass destruction, the sentence commutation for one of the culprits, the politicization of the Justice Department? Or maybe it's the fact that, when you object to any of those things either before, during, or after they happen, you are ignored--marginalized as a member of the "angry left"?

To my recollection it was not the the angry left, working people who spent the last three months ironically calling Obama an elitist (or a terrorist fist-jabber, for that matter). And consequently, I'm fairly dubious of the notion that we're the ones that President Obama has to worry about the most. But if I'm wrong and Obama does any of the things that have made the left so darned angry over the years, then he's looking to become the next president with a high-60s disapproval rating. Because we're all angry left now.

UPDATE to include video: Oh the inanity!